Modelling a Day of Trips in 3D

In a Survey Design and Analysis course that I'm taking currently, we recently read a paper from Cynthia Chen et al. on "The promises of big data and small data for travel behavior (aka human mobility) analysis" (DOI: [10.1016/j.trc.2016.04.005](http:dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.trc.2016.04.005, behind paywall). Since plenty of other people have talked about the advantages and disadvantages of big data, I'm only going to touch on a data visualization technique I thought was pretty cool. Chen et al. created a 3D illustration of trip segments, tours, and daily activity/travel patterns. I decided to write up a short python script so that I could see my own day in 3D.

So there's definitely a bit of work to do to polish this up, but the code creates a plot which I saved as the svg below. The longitude and latitude numbers don't make sense because I made up everything in the plot below.